The Street-Facing Window in Belleville That Serves the Bérégovoy
Three ex-Experimental Cocktail Club bartenders opened a cocktail bistro on rue de Belleville in 2017. It still runs like the neighbourhood built it.
The window is the tell. On rue de Belleville, between a Thai kitchen and a Chinese wholesaler, a black-and-white storefront opens straight onto the pavement, and in summer the bartenders pass drinks through it to people who never came inside. That's the working version of Combat: a small room with hanging dried greenery and mirrored walls, a green boudoir alcove at the back, and a bar that treats the street as part of the seating plan.
Elena Schmitt, Margot Lecarpentier and Elise Drouet opened it in 2017. All three came out of Experimental Cocktail Club, and in 2020 the World's 50 Best Bars list called Lecarpentier the most influential bartender in Paris. The name is local history — Combat was the old pseudonym for this stretch of Belleville, home to a 19th-century animal-fighting circus at the nearby Place du Combat. What they built isn't a speakeasy and isn't trying to be. It's a cocktail bistro on a working street in the 19th, and the neighbourhood treats it that way.
The three most technically decorated bartenders in Paris opened a bar that serves drinks through a window, and that decision is the whole review.
Editorial Deep
The Bérégovoy is the drink to start on — 30 and 40 Calvados, Ferrand cognac, Madeira Verdelho, dry Ferrand curaçao, Scrappy's orange bitters. It reads like a brown-spirit exercise on paper and drinks lighter than that. From there, the Rhydypandy is the more interesting choice: Ocho tequila, Drouin pommeau, fresh fennel juice, maple syrup and lemon, the kind of build that would collapse in less careful hands and holds together here. The Norrebro plays with vinegar and acidity on a Rittenhouse rye base — order it when someone at the table wants to know what the bar is doing on its most technical drink.
At seven, the room is quiet enough to hear the ice. Whitewashed stone walls, low ceilings hung with dried greenery, mirrors doubling the space, and a green boudoir alcove at the back that seats a handful of people who want to be slightly hidden. Sit at the bar early — it's the seat that gets the conversation and the first pours of anything new.
It's a Belleville crowd, not a Marais crowd — people who live within a fifteen-minute walk, plus the bar-industry contingent who show up because they know who's behind the stick. Nobody is dressed for a photograph. In summer, the street window pulls in whoever's walking past rue de Belleville, and the energy on the pavement is the energy of the bar. That's the room at its best: loose, multilingual, and moving between inside and outside without anyone policing it.
Snacks include Rodolphe Paquin's pork terrine, aged gouda from Trouvailles and Terroirs, artichoke hearts with Piedmont hazelnuts, capers and cherries. For drinks built by ex-ECC hands, the pricing is fair. The Marais cocktail rooms doing work in the same class run materially higher, and the reason is the arrondissement — a 19th-arrondissement postcode is a discount the bar has chosen not to give back.
This is the best version of what a Paris neighbourhood cocktail bar can be — serious drinks, no door, no attitude, a street window in summer. Come back on a Wednesday in July at eight, take a seat at the bar, order the du jour and then the Bérégovoy, and see what the terrace does after ten. Don't come back on a Tuesday — the schedule is inconsistent across listings, so check before you walk over. And don't come looking for a speakeasy: anyone who wants a velvet rope and a password is on the wrong Métro line.
Order this
Drink this.
The Bérégovoy, then the cocktail du jour, with a plate of Rodolphe Paquin's terrine
“A cocktail bistro on rue de Belleville run by three ex-Experimental Cocktail Club bartenders, priced like the neighbourhood and built like the Marais.”
Combat is the sharpest version of a Paris neighbourhood cocktail bar — technical drinks from decorated hands, snacks with named sourcing, a room that shifts registers between apéro and midnight, and a street-facing window that turns the pavement into part of the plan. Go for the Bérégovoy, order the du jour while you're at it, and sit at the bar before eight if the drinks are the reason you came.
The Verdict
